They don’t make them like that any more: Garmin Nuvi 300

In the days before an automotive satnav unit was just an extension of a smartphone, the Garmin Nuvi 300 was the pinnacle of this technology. Garmin’s competitors – of which there were, and remain, few – might not have agreed with that assessment, but the Nuvi 300 was feature-packed, and undeniably practical. The automotive satnav market has been in decline ever since.

The Nuvi 300 was released in 2005, and cost about £79. That’s roughly £140 in 2024 money. It was cheaper than the competition, but had features that no competitor had then, and most don’t have now. Here’s just a few.

• It could play music and audiobooks. When playing audio, it would pause the playback while speaking directions, so you didn’t miss anything. It even supported Audible’s proprietary audiobook format.
• It had a real audio output jack (bear in mind that the Nuvi 300 predates Bluetooth). I could plug the Nuvi’s audio output into my car stereo, rather than relying on the built-in speaker.
• Apart from the usual postcode input, the Nuvi could give directions to a GB OS grid reference. This is a huge benefit when navigating to a tiny car park in the middle of a forest – no postcode.
• The Nuvi could route around traffic obstructions whose locations were broadcast by local radio stations (using RDS/TMC). No smartphone app, no subscription. It worked, and was free to use, forever. Admittedly, you needed an additional antenna for this.
  
• You could zoom the map in and out, and rotate it, using finger gestures. The built-in satnav in my Volkswagen can’t do that, twenty years later.
• The power supply connection was on the mounting cradle, not the satnav itself. It’s hard to overstate how big a deal this was in 2005. At that time, it was common for cars to be broken into to just steal a satnav – some were that expensive. There was nothing to disconnect on the Nuvi – it just unclipped from its cradle.
• The Nuvi had a bicycle mode, which changed the routing algorithm to favour minor roads, but still avoid footpaths. Weirdly, although Garmin advertised this as a feature, they never supplied a bicycle or motorcycle mount, so far as I know, and the Nuvi wasn’t waterproof. Although a niche feature, I did actually use my Nuvi 300 for cycling from time to time.

It’s interesting to compare these features with contemporary automotive satnav devices. In general, modern devices fall short in important areas, despite twenty years of technological development.

Modern stand-alone satnav devices generally don’t have audio outputs, although you might be able to pair them with a Bluetooth-equipped car radio.

That’s not as important as it used to be, though, because they usually don’t play music or audiobooks. Garmin removed this feature because they claimed it to be a safety hazard. So now I have to play music from my smartphone, which is a safety hazard, not to mention illegal, if I’m moving. So I don’t find this argument compelling.

To remove a modern device from the car, you have to fiddle about with a power connector on the unit. And leave a dangling cable on the dashboard.

Worst of all, I can’t find a modern satnav that supports OS grid references. To navigate to that tiny car park in the hills, I have to convert the grid reference to latitude and longitude. What a drag.

Many modern devices don’t support RDS/TMC routing. Some can get traffic information from a paired smartphone. But this requires a specific app, which could be doing anything it likes with your location data; and, of course, it requires you to be carrying a smartphone. And to be within signal range.

Of course, there’s a lot that a modern device can do, that would have been impractical twenty years ago. To update the maps on my Nuvi 300, I had to copy them to an SD card, using proprietary Garmin software. Modern devices can download maps using Wifi or 4G. Having said that, I have to admin that to update the maps on my car’s built-in satnav, I have to take it to a Volkswagen dealer. Frankly, I don’t find the modern developments in this area to be particularly useful, compared to what has been lost.

I wonder sometimes: why is it that so many consumer electronics manufacturers discard useful features as technology develops? Why don’t mobile phones have a headphone jack any more? Why do we need a stack of obscure tools to replace the hard disk in a modern laptop, when my W520 just has a sliding lever that pops the disk out? Why does my stupidly-expensive Astell and Kern media player not have FM radio support, when my 2005 Cowon does?

Why, in short, does technological advance not make consumer devices better?

Part of the problem, I guess, is that pricing is so competitive, that every feature, however cheap, has to justify itself on cost grounds. Nobody wants to pay much for anything. In fact, nobody wants to pay anything, which is the modern world is so choked with intrusive advertising.

Only a fraction of satnav owners want to navigate to a grid reference, or play audiobooks, and it costs money to maintain these features. Similarly, supplying a powered mounting cradle requires specific design and tooling, compared to a passive cradle and a dangling cable. Maybe this feature would only add fifty pence to the sale price of the unit but, in a market where price is everything, that’s still fifty pence too much for many people.

The problem with this argument was that, back in 2005, the Nuvi 300 was cheaper than anything else on the market, as well as being superior. Conceivably Garmin deliberately under-priced the unit, to encourage people away from its main competitor (Tomtom, in the UK).

Whatever the explanation, the Garmin Nuvi 300 was the first automotive satnav I owned and, at one time, I owned three of them. I still have one on my quad-bike. They all still work, although it’s hard – but not impossible – to update the maps. The only reason I’m not still using them in my car is that cars have satnav built in these days. The built-in satnav is rubbish, but not so bad that I feel the need to install another one.

And, of course, many people – perhaps most people – use smartphone navigation apps these days. Smartphones are completely inappropriate for vehicular navigation, not to mention catastrophic for personal privacy, but they come with the advantage that you probably already have one. So, in a choice between using something inappropriate, and paying for something better, many people will opt for the inappropriate.